Acquisitiveness Quotes

“The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world – no matter how his affairs may prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself. The giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Use and Misuse of Children

“Besides the Vitaraag Lords (absolutely detached Ones) and the speech of the Vitaraag Lords, there is indeed no other path that will free one from the bondage of karma.”
― Dada Bhagwan, Aptavani-6

“It is a sense of possessiveness and inner attachment (parigraha) for speech to ask, "How did I speak?”
― Dada Bhagwan

“Decades later, it's striking to see the archival center clearly articulating the value of collections like Estelle's, using words that no one in the archdiocese could muster at the time of the sale: "The Archival Center," its website says today, "long ago embraced the notion expressed by Lawrence Clark Powell that: 'the collecting of books is...the summum bonum {highest good} of the acquisitive desire, for the reason that books brought together by plan and purposely kept together are a social force to be reckoned with, as long as people have clear eyes and free minds.”
― Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey

“The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in history has been accompanied by a second change, which, if equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its significance. "Trade is one thing, religion is another": once advanced as an audacious novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form two separate and co-ordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning assurance at which its-earliest exponents would have felt some embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the validity of an idea than to understand its development. The effects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift, need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, it is now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories propounded by Schoolmen; the fulminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury, landgrabbing, and extortionate prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which they had overthrown, are bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institution of property, the transactions of the marketplace, the whole fabric of society and the whole range of its activities, stand by no absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion. All insist that Christianity has no more deadly foe than the appetitus divitiarum infinitus, the unbridled indulgence of the aquisitive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep its hands off business encountered, when first formulated, a great body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after a warfare not confined to paper, that it affected the transition from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned truth.”
― Tawney. R.H.